Fairy Tale Endings
by ShadowCell
Summary: AUish kind of oneshot, about our favorite purplehaired wonder Jona, and how DESTINY might have gone if Fukuda and Morosawa hadn't decided to turn him into a sad attempt at comic relief.


Fairy Tale Endings

Disclaimer: _Gundam SEED DESTINY_ is the property of Bandai, not me, so I don't make any money off this. Call your lawyers to rest; there are better things to sue me over than _DESTINY_ anyways.

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Jona Roma Seiran. The most hated character of _DESTINY_, topping even Shinn Asuka. Jona was an interesting, scheming, villainous character in the first thirteen episodes of _DESTINY_—then came episode fourteen, where Mitsuo Fukuda caved in to the shrieking fangirls fearing for their OTP and turned Jona into an absolute waste of ink and voice actor. Yes, this fic is a serious departure from the character of Jona we saw in _DESTINY_. I'm taking what I saw of him in the first thirteen episodes and going to different places. It needs to be done anyways.

So this is an obviously somewhat AU piece about poor old Jona. As for what's so AU about it, well, you'll see.

Reposting is fun! Some things have been changed— grammatical and spelling edits aside, the overall story that our friend Jona tells has been lengthened and changed a bit. Enjoy.

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The prince in shining armor is supposed to slay the evil dragon that holds the beautiful princess captive, and with evil vanquished, prince and princess are supposed to be wed in a big beautiful ceremony, and ride off into the sunset to live happily ever after.

Or at least, that's how it goes in the fairy tales. However, I have yet to see a fairy tale where the prince sends an army to slay the dragon, the princess is perfectly capable of slaying the dragon herself but is slowly robbed of the will to use that power, and the prince and princess hate each other and the idea of getting married, but they do it anyways because the king is a stupid old fart with fairy-tale-esque delusions and the prince has big plans for his little princess.

I'm guessing those kind of fairy tales don't sell very well.

So, after marrying Cagalli Yula Athha—or should I say Cagalli Yula Athha-Seiran—I can honestly say I hated her. She was bossy, condescending, disgustingly idealistic, foolish, reckless, completely inept as a politician, and to be honest, a pretty lousy soldier too. I mean, when she was aboard the _Archangel_, at least Major La Fllaga managed to bring that Skygrasper of his back home every once in a while. With Cagalli, they always had to go find it. She even had to get shot down to meet her knight in shining armor, good old perfect and flawless Mr. Hero, Athrun Zala himself.

Ah, Athrun...well, I'll get to you soon enough.

Of course, for all the faults I found in Cagalli, I'm sure she found just as many in me. According to her, I'm manipulative, lecherous, amoral, impatient, insensitive, and stray too far from the Athha family's foreign policy, which she seems to think is Orb political tradition. However, I seem to remember Uzumi Nara Athha's "we're going to have our cake and eat it too" brand of foreign policy being a solely Athha trait.

So Cagalli and I hated each other, but for the people of Orb we forced ourselves to put on smiles and act like the perfect couple we weren't. I had a couple mistresses already, because, y'know, Cagalli made a boring wife, and Cagalli was probably still pining for Athrun Zala. But the Orb media isn't supposed to know that and neither should you, so let's just keep this under our hats, hmm? The people of Orb thought we were as happy as those dimwitted parents on _Ozzie and Harriett_ were, and fortunately, Cagalli and I both had the security to keep the press out of our private lives and the prudence not to go together to places where we might fight in the presence of anyone who could dispel our "happy couple" myth.

Looking back, this all went remarkably well. It was Cosmic Era 73. The debris from Junius 7 had hardly stopped falling and already the Atlantic Federation was rebuilding the Earth Alliance and gathering up allies for a retaliatory strike on the PLANTs. They approached us with an "offer" (I suppose that's American for "demand") to join the Earth Alliance, and since they had brought an abnormally large battlefleet and a very large, very ugly, and probably very powerful mobile armor with them, we duly decided to acquiesce, after kicking out the ZAFT ship _Minerva_ of course. Sure, it was kind of ungrateful to kick out the ship that had helped keep pieces of Junius 7 from smashing us, but in the face of Atlantic Federation guns that were just as capable of smashing us, it seemed like the smart thing to do. I mean, last time we had an Atlantic Federation fleet staring us down, we told them to go screw themselves, and that didn't really turn out well for us. And seeing as how we're all still in one piece, I guess that means we were right. Score one for Cagalli's idealism really being naiveté.

Not long after the _Minerva_ departed with a bang, as did the majority of the Atlantic Fed fleet and that ass-ugly mobile armor of theirs, Cagalli and I were married. The wedding began without a hitch, but then we received news that the Freedom Gundam, or at least that's what she called it, was on its way, so I whisked Cagalli away to an underground bunker. Since the Freedom's objective was to kidnap Cagalli, it obviously failed, and though it took a hell of a lot of military power, eventually we forced the Freedom off. The _Archangel_ fled from Orb, and Cagalli and I were wed after all. She was unhappy the whole time, of course, but when I questioned her about it, she claimed to be marrying me for the sake of Orb's people. And so, hoping the best for her country, she reluctantly but still willingly yielded to me a great deal of her political power and prestige.

And, later that night, she yielded a whole lot more.

I immediately dispatched Captain Todaka aboard the _Takemikazuchi_ to bring that troublesome _Archangel_ down. Naturally, Cagalli was furious, but a sound tongue-lashing soon put her in order. She should have realized anyways that with the Earth Alliance already plenty pissed off at the PLANTs for that whole Junius 7 incident, some rogue ship belonging to us would be a dangerous liability here on Earth. But the fun was only just beginning.

Not even a few days after Cagalli and I had reluctantly tied the knot, we received a visitor from the stars. A fellow in a red mobile suit Cagalli identified as a Gundam came in, identifying himself as Cagalli's bodyguard, Alex Dino. Naturally, we all wanted to know what Cagalli's bodyguard was doing flying around our airspace in a shiny red Gundam that was carrying a ZAFT IFF code, and after successfully being put on the spot, she was forced to admit that quiet, mild-mannered Alex Dino was really Mr. Fantastic himself, famed ZAFT hero and defector Athrun Zala. Of course, this I already knew—who the hell did he think he was fooling with that goofy alias and those dorky sunglasses anyways?—but apparently the staffers at the Orb National Defense Headquarters aren't as swift as I am and were all shocked to learn that he was quiet mild-mannered bodyguard Alex Dino by day and Athrun Zala, Protector of Justice by night. Of course, we told him to screw off, but he didn't take that for an answer so we mobilized to go bring his angst-ridden ass down. It took 25 Murasames, 47 M1 Astrays, and sixteen battleships, including, at one point, the _Takemikazuchi_, and we wound up with about two hundred casualties on our hands, but by the end of the day Morgenroete had a new ZAFT-built Gundam to play with, Athrun Zala had been brought to the National Defense Headquarters in chains, and I had just been handed the royal flush that would let me completely destroy Cagalli's life and cripple her permanently.

Plus, the spaghetti and tossed salad I had for dinner that night was _really_ good.

I had the pleasure of witnessing the fight that broke out the next morning between them. I hadn't known it, but Athrun had left for the PLANTs to meet with Chairman Dullindal and try to force a peaceful solution to the rapidly deteriorating situation between the Earth Alliance and the PLANTs. Cagalli had seen him off thinking that this was the case, and in his absence, she had had little choice but to marry me for the stability of the country, which made for a nasty surprise for Athrun when he got back. So Cagalli was expecting him to return with peace in hand, and thus was understandably upset to see him as the newest member of a secret elite ZAFT force, riding home in a shiny new ZAFT prototype mobile suit. I had to agree with her, though, as she violently smacked Athrun in the face—with his ring still on, too, leaving a satisfying trail of blood all over the place—and screamed at him that he had betrayed her. He gave halfhearted excuses about Chairman Dullindal's commitment to peace, but my dear boy, I am a politician, and when I hear Dullindal say that the PLANTs are "aggressively asserting their right to self defense," I really hear "attack," which is not something peace-minded nations tend to do. Now feeling thoroughly betrayed, Cagalli didn't care what I did with Athrun and stormed off in a hurry, and so I seized the moment to swiftly have him executed.

And so ended Athrun Zala. A nice Continental breakfast later and my day was off to an abnormally good start.

That afternoon, Cagalli entered my office with all the subtlety and elegance of a tornado and from her mouth issued forth an argument that probably would have had some kind of violent eloquence to it if it hadn't involved so many obscenities. Though I have to admit I did learn some interesting new euphemisms for homosexuality from that little tirade. Nevertheless, after wading through a stream of vulgarities that would have made Stalin cry, I soon got to the root of the problem and discovered that she was mad that I'd had Athrun executed. I halfheartedly gave her some bullshit excuses about him trying to break out and our security forces having to kill him before he escaped and wreaked who knows how much havoc, but as expected, she didn't buy it for a second. She was truly furious, and only the presence of armed guards stopped her from inflicting physical harm and probably death on me right there, but nonetheless the tempestuous fire of the old Cagalli, the one who ran off to join grimy desert guerillas and always got shot down in one of the _Archangel_'s Skygraspers, had returned as she spewed venom on me. She left with a door-slam that Uzumi probably heard, and that night I was actually afraid she would make good on her threats and do something terribly drastic and destructive. After ordering extra security on Onogoro Island, I still couldn't sleep, and laid awake all night trying to think of the things she could do to me and the things I could still do to prevent it or control the damage.

All my worrying was for naught, though, because the tempestuous fire of the old Cagalli did not survive the night. I had all the cards and she knew it, and like always, the only thing she could do was her grit her teeth and accept it.

The war continued on, and Captain Todaka's search for the _Archangel_ was interrupted by the Atlantic Federation's "request" (another word that seems to mean "demand" in American) for reinforcements to help them pin down a ZAFT detachment, including the famous _Minerva_, in the Dardanelles near the Mediterranean Sea. Not having a whole lot of choice in the matter, I sent Todaka on his way. Once again, Cagalli was furious, but once again, she could do nothing. Fortunately, the _Archangel_ showed up at the Dardanelles after all, but them and their annoying Freedom escaped again, and in the chaos of battle, Todaka scuttled the _Takemikazuchi_. That bastard, the _Takemikazuchi_ was such a nice ship too. Well, at least he went down with it, which saves me the trouble of executing him. Then a conflagration involving some hideous gigantic mobile suit called Destroy rose up in Berlin and Chairman Dullindal declared war on LOGOS. In retrospect, this was a pretty poor pretense—all my studies of history have taught me that declaring war on intangible things is a bad idea, but everyone was on Dullindal's side on this one so I guess that didn't much matter. For some reason, Dullindal decided to start his war on the Merchants of Death with Operation _Angel Down_, a concentrated attack on the roaming _Archangel_. Cagalli was again furious and demanded that I dispatch the remains of our Orb fleet to go help them. Unfortunately, Cagalli had little grasp of the real situation—our fleet was less of a fleet and more of a collection of shot-up battleships that had just had the shit kicked out of them, our mobile suits were almost all missing at least one appendage, the _Archangel _had consistently attacked our units as well as Earth Alliance and ZAFT units and was thus an enemy, and at the time what was left of our fleet was rounding the Cape of Good Hope and couldn't really do anything about the _Archangel_, which was up near the Baltic Sea. At any rate, ZAFT wiped out the Freedom and the _Archangel_ in one blow of the hammer, or one blow of the gigantic oversized anti-ship sword in the case of the Freedom, and my dirty work was done for me. Cagalli insisted on mourning Kira Yamato's death, but hey, did the Norwegians cry when Vidkun Quisling died? I think not. Traitors are traitors. Just to be sure, though, I sent a few long-range units to go make sure the _Archangel_ and the Freedom were _really_ smoldering rubble. A couple days later I had a big envelope full of pictures of charred corpses among the debris of the _Archangel_ on my desk and a sobbing Cagalli in front me. Score another one for ol' Jona.

With the _Archangel_ now a quite harmless field of wreckage, Dullindal turned his attention towards the Earth Alliance's latest high-tech secret headquarters, Heaven's Base up in Iceland, where the members of LOGOS had gone to hide. The Earth Alliance rolled out five of those giant Destroy units, but ZAFT responded with some new machines of their own, and it didn't take long for Heaven's Base to be reduced to a smoldering ruin as well. Unfortunately for Dullindal, the LOGOS ringleader, Lord Djibril, managed to slip away, and guess where he came running? You guessed it, good old Orb, the place to drag all your angry international armies. My father, being the Atlantic Federation-friendly fool he was, secretly allowed Djibril into the country. Cagalli, as usual, was furious, and for once, I had to agree with my obnoxious bride, though for different reasons. Cagalli insisted that we were violating Orb's "longstanding tradition" of neutrality by harboring a madman like Djibril. I just figured it was a bad idea to be harboring a guy who had all of ZAFT and several nations of the Earth after him. Cagalli agreed with that as well, in an afterthought kind of way, but it was still a rare moment of us agreeing on something so I suppose it should still be cherished. But then all the fun started happening in space, as ZAFT forces finally located the long-stolen ship _Eternal_. It busted out of an asteroid and started a high-speed chase over the Earth, dropping a pod that contained two high-performance prototype mobile suits—more of these damn Gundams, is there one giant ass that these things get pulled out of or what?—as it tried to escape. Unfortunately for the _Eternal_ crew, the pod landed in Australia, where it was quickly captured by ZAFT and the technological secrets of its contents quickly devoured. As for the _Eternal_, the last anyone saw of it, it was burning up in the atmosphere over the Atlantic Ocean. ZAFT had its suspicions about the asteroid it had broken out of and found it to be a camouflaged mobile suit factory, which was quickly captured. All that remained now was Djibril.

ZAFT wasn't long in figuring out that Djibril had come running like a little girl to Orb, and immediately a very large fleet arrived on our borders, a scene we all seemed to be getting used to now. My father told them to screw off, but Cagalli and I soon thereafter announced that Djibril _was_ here, my father was a lying douchebag, and we were trying to find him. ZAFT didn't think that was good enough, so they added a deadline, which came and went, and before long, we had ZAFT troops all over our asses. Fortunately, the mayhem of the battle gave me a convenient opportunity to blow off my father's head with a well-placed .45 slug and say it was a ZAFT soldier, thus putting me in charge of Orb. Unfortunately, Djibril managed to escape at the last minute via the Seiran family shuttle— yeah, take our shuttle, thanks for that, you bastard. Dullindal probably wanted to finish us off for harboring him, but the world was baying for Djibril's blood, so Dullindal was forced to ignore us and shift the focus to space. Djibril immediately proved that old adage about trapped animals fighting the fiercest by firing his big fancy Requiem cannon and taking out a bunch of PLANTs. He managed to shoot down more than a quarter of them by the time the ZAFT fleet caught up to him, and one really huge epic battle later, Daedalus Crater was no more, the Requiem was no more, another four PLANTs were no more, and Djibril was no more. It was satisfying, in a sick and twisted way, to finally see some rain fall on the otherwise perfect existence of the Coordinators. The real fun, though, will be when they discover that this genetic equivalent of incest they've been practicing for two generations already wasn't such a good idea.

While we were sitting tight and watching with glee on Earth, things quickly went to shit up in the PLANTs. Dullindal, despite his weakened position and the loss of over a quarter of his nation's population, assumed that the Earth Alliance was irreversibly crippled after his pyrrhic victory at Daedalus Crater and tried to pitch his Destiny Plan to the world, which, so far as I could tell, was some kind of genetic caste system or something. I don't know, and it didn't really matter anyway, because he woefully miscalculated how weakened the Earth Alliance was. They threw everything they had at the PLANTs, including a few more of those gigantic Destroys, and a whole lot of nukes. Nine more PLANTs were destroyed before the Alliance pulled back, and that was only because they were running out of ammo. Us in Orb contemplated joining the fun, but our space fleet just wasn't cut out for that kind of action, the Sahakus up at Ame-no-Mihashira weren't about to cooperate, and Cagalli was bitching up a storm. Not that _that_ ever stopped me, but we really had nothing to gain from getting our hands dirty in this whole affair, and I was more than content to let the Atlantic Federation do all the hitting for me.

The Alliance planned a second attack, and a third, and a fourth, and however many more it would take for the PLANTs to capitulate as a nation, but as they regrouped, something more exciting happened. Dullindal refused to stand down on the Destiny Plan, even though it was clearly leading the PLANTs to oblivion, and the great ZAFT flagship _Minerva_, plus all its crew and almost half of the ZAFT fleet, deserted at once under the command of the _Minerva_'s captain, Talia Gladys, sparking a civil war. Lacus Clyne made a couple of pitiful appeals for peace on Dullindal's behalf, but the loss of so many PLANTs on Dullindal's watch and his drastic miscalculation of the Alliance's strength had eroded his support, and so made the civil war that much more divisive and bloody. Oh, it didn't last more than a couple of months, but those couple of months destroyed seven more PLANTs— bringing the PLANT death count to around sixty— before Gladys and her followers finally destroyed Dullindal's headquarters of Messiah and that nifty Destiny Gundam killed Dullindal himself. Captain Gladys became _Chairwoman_ Gladys and the PLANTs promptly decided to hide in their shells and lick their wounds. The Alliance wasn't faring much better, and were miffed at getting robbed of the chance to wipe out the rest of the PLANTs, but for now they were willing to let the PLANTs cower in their corner of space, while they rebuilt their lunar bases and pointed a whole mess of nuclear warheads at the PLANTs in case they ever got uppity again.

But that wasn't the end of our problems; the Atlantic Federation was not pleased with our sitting on the sidelines not doing anything, as well as what they regarded as our complicity with ZAFT during the whole "Djibril is here and he's going to get us all killed" thing, and came knocking with their third fleet hanging out in our waters in as many years. However, ZAFT had kicked their asses, and it showed—this time our smaller but superior weapons and troops managed to beat out their numerical superiority and force them off. They tried again, but once again, we prevailed, and our war settled into that fleet dropping anchor outside our territorial waters, looking pissed off but not really doing anything.

We didn't really like what essentially amounted to the Atlantic Fed blockading us because we didn't want ZAFT to blow our asses up, so we secretly began devising a counterattack that would cause so much mayhem and destruction in Atlantic Fed territory that the fleet would have no choice but to go home. We'd get a bunch of stealth-use Murasames, modified to not really look like Murasames, secretly ship them to some island near South America, and give the Atlantic Fed a taste of the carpet bombing and aerial death they'd been forcing down our throats all this time. With an attack like this on their homeland, the fleet would have no choice but to retreat and fight this new enemy that they think is someone else and not us. Then of course we would force a peace either on the negotiation table or with more of these mystery raiders, but either way this plan afforded us the luxury of pissing the Atlantic Fed off and giving them a phantom enemy to fight while leaving us alone, and eventually their people would get sick of this and they'd leave us alone for good. Frankly, this plan kicked ass. Sure, it was sneaky, devious, and cruel, but it kicked more ass than it was any of that, so we were going to go ahead with it. Cagalli was of course horrified at the idea of us bombing civilian cities, and once again, that fire of the old Cagalli threatened to rise, but by now she was too weak, and a part of me was disappointed to see her once again grit her teeth and accept it.

Nonetheless, we carried out our attacks, the Atlantic Fed fleet rushed home, and one month and a dozen devastated major cities later, the Atlantic Fed signed a peace treaty with us. We kept up our devious little attacks for a few months afterwards, to prevent them from getting suspicious, and then made a big show of pretending that we found these mystery raiders and destroyed them, and so the Atlantic Fed sat down to lick its wounds and leave everyone alone.

Two weeks after our supposed victory over the phantom bombers, Cagalli Yula Athha-Seiran was found dead of a gunshot wound to the head in her private retreat. The people of Orb believed it was a murder and it immediately took on the mystique and national grief of the assassination of John F Kennedy in America in the 20th century. I, of course, recognized her suicide for what it was, but nonetheless I immediately capitalized on the "murder" to elevate my prestige to dizzying heights, and passed all sorts of new draconian and authoritarian acts to solidify my power. Cagalli's death helped me to realize my dreams. Soon Orb will be a world power, stronger than even the Atlantic Federation, and Cagalli's death was simply a necessary sacrifice for the greater good.

Yes, it sounds awfully akin to something a little fellow by the name of Hitler did a long time ago, but all his insanity and delusions of grandeur aside, he still had the right idea. People aren't to be trusted with freedoms. It's a cruel world—kill or be killed. That's the way it is. Orb will kill instead of be killed. Uzumi Nala Athha said that nothing good would come from a circle of killing. A fat lot of good his trying to interrupt the circle did—the world simply operates on a dog-eat-dog basis, and the point of the game is to be the dog that eats all the other dogs. I'd like to think Cagalli learned that before she died. But her usefulness to my plans was largely expired once the Atlantic Federation was out of the picture, and she knew it. Her final act of defiance against me was to rob me of herself, but like everything she ever did, that backfired and instead I became one of the most powerful men in the world. Someday I will have the power to challenge the PLANTs, and the world will be remade in my image. The history books will depict me as the conqueror that ushered in a new world order for a new age, free of petty strife between Naturals and Coordinators, filled instead with progress and the weeding out of the weak and unnecessary as we march onwards towards our evolution into higher creatures; and you made it possible, Cagalli.

Looks like someone gets to live happily ever after, after all.


End file.
